This story covers the author's journey from the time she fell into a coma and woke up totally deaf, through her surgery to get an "electronic ear" (more correctly called a cochlear implant) and the ongoing effort to learn how to use it to hear again. There are many problems with substitute hearing, but they do fade--like background noise--to a place of lesser importance. Electronic hearing may not be perfect, but it's a whole lot better than no hearing at all.